]]>http://www.organicauthority.com/michael-pollan-clears-things-up-were-driving-our-cars-on-food-and-feeding-half-to-other-food-yep-video/feed/0‘Fed Up': The Film About Your Food That You’re Not Supposed to See [Video]http://www.organicauthority.com/fed-up-the-film-about-your-food-that-youre-not-supposed-to-see-video/
http://www.organicauthority.com/fed-up-the-film-about-your-food-that-youre-not-supposed-to-see-video/#commentsFri, 09 May 2014 07:00:09 +0000http://www.organicauthority.com/?p=29295

If you haven't yet heard of the film "Fed Up," most likely you will soon. Produced by Katie Couric and Laurie David ("An Inconvenient Truth"), the film looks at our out of control obesity crisis spurred by our sugar dependency. "The government is subsidizing the obesity epidemic," author Michael Pollan says in the film. Ain't that the truth. It's a must-see, particularly if you have children. Opens in select theaters nationwide Friday, May 9th.

If you haven’t yet heard of the film “Fed Up,” most likely you will soon. Produced by Katie Couric and Laurie David (“An Inconvenient Truth”), the film looks at our out-of-control obesity crisis spurred by our sugar dependency. “The government is subsidizing the obesity epidemic,” author Michael Pollan says in the film. Ain’t that the truth. It’s a must-see, particularly if you have children. Opens in select theaters nationwide Friday, May 9th.

]]>http://www.organicauthority.com/fed-up-the-film-about-your-food-that-youre-not-supposed-to-see-video/feed/0Are these Really the 50 Most Powerful People in Food?http://www.organicauthority.com/are-these-really-the-50-most-powerful-people-in-food/
http://www.organicauthority.com/are-these-really-the-50-most-powerful-people-in-food/#commentsTue, 28 Jan 2014 08:00:50 +0000http://www.organicauthority.com/?p=27356

Just who exactly is shaping how you eat? Probably, you like to think that you alone are responsible for your food decisions. And if you're growing your own food, that's quite possibly the case. But for the majority of us, it's a different story.

Just who exactly is shaping how you eat? Probably, you like to think that you alone are responsible for your food decisions. And if you’re growing your own food, that’s quite possibly the case. But for the majority of us, it’s a different story.

According to the Daily Meal’s top 50 most influential people in our food-purchasing decisions, the situation isn’t very inspiring. But sadly, it’s pretty accurate. Just take a look at the top five:

Tom Vilsack, Secretary, USDA

Hugh Grant, Chairman and CEO, Monsanto

Doug McMillion, President and CEO, Walmart

Michael Taylor, Deputy Commissioner, FDA

Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO, Pepsico

We are, for the most part, pretty reliant on the “food industry” that influences what we buy at supermarkets and restaurants. They sponsor the cooking shows we watch. They take out full-page ads in our favorite magazines, and two-minute commercials during the Super Bowl. That’s power over our food, certainly.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The restaurateurs, chefs and even food brands are being pressed by Big-Ag—that’s producers like Cargill (#10), Tyson (#12) and Monsanto (#2). They provide the commodities like sugar, corn and soy, and the animal products that find their way into prepared foods, recipes and menu items that we’re bombarded with on a regular basis. It’s a chain reaction causing cravings and even addictions to these unhealthy and unethical foods that people like PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk (#43) and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey (#28) are doing everything they can to stop us from eating. Not just for the health of the animals or the environment. But for our own health, too.

What we eat is also part of a process that’s been called “the Walmart effect.” The gargantuan retailer’s demands are so exorbitant that manufacturers are forced to make shifts in all areas of production and marketing, which spirals out to other retail outlets, restaurants and eventually, your plate, even if you don’t shop at Walmart, or purchase Pepsi products and do your best to avoid GMOs.

You’re not alone.

On the Daily Meal’s list are movers and shakers in the organic, ethical and slow food movement like Alice Waters (#39), Michael Pollan (#34), and Mark Bittman (#42). First Lady Michele Obama (#22) is on the list too, for her efforts in making our food system healthier, particularly for our nation’s children. (We would have also added Will Fantle and Mark Kastel of The Cornucopia Institute—the leading organic industry watchdog group keeping organic food safe.)

Ultimately, the list is nothing but names and numbers. The order doesn’t matter so much, except perhaps for these two: Ben Silbermann, founder and CEO, Pinterest (#23) and Jeremy Stoppelman Co-founder and CEO, Yelp (#9). Why do these two matter more than say, the CEO of McDonald’s (#15) or Craig Jelinek, the CEO of Costco (#13)? Because websites like Pinterest and Yelp give us voices. Us being the perceived little people. The subservient open mouths and hollow bellies ready and willing to eat what we’re told. Websites that give us voices and the opportunities to share healthy recipes and tips on restaurants and brands, also give us power. And even though the corporate interests that dominate the list seem to be pulling the strings attached to our food choices, they’re really beholden to you and me. They’re only as successful as we let them be. The more food information we share through networks like Pinterest and Yelp, the more we change the food system—putting each and every one of us in the top spot when it comes to who is most powerful in deciding what we eat.

Surely he showers. He always looks clean in interviews, even despite all the time he must spend in the kitchen. So, how gnarly could the bacteria living in Michael Pollan's bellybutton actually be? Why am I asking, you wonder? Because someone cultured bacteria from the best-selling author's innie (or does he have an outie?), and turned it into cheese. That you could eat. Technically.

Surely he showers. He always looks clean in interviews, even despite all the time he must spend in the kitchen. So, how gnarly could the bacteria living in Michael Pollan’s bellybutton actually be? Why am I asking, you wonder? Because someone cultured bacteria from the best-selling author’s innie (or does he have an outie?), and turned it into cheese. That you could eat. Technically.

UCLA Microbioligist Christina Agapakis partnered with artist Sissel Tolaas to create cheeses from microbes that grow on human skin. Michael Pollan, the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and his latest, “Cooked,” where he actually experiments with cheese making, was an obvious candidate. “The microbiologist used swabs from her mouth and skin, as well as from Pollan’s belly button, [Olafur] Eliasson’s tears and another scientist’s feet,” reports NPR. “She grew the bacteria and yeast in Petri dishes in the lab and then, once she had enough, she added them to fresh milk. The result was a cheese designed to make you rethink the sometimes fine line between stinky and appetizing.” And not to mention what’s growing in your bellybutton.

According to Agapakis, the bacteria that colonizes in our bellybuttons are similar to those found in some strains of cheese, “So a lot of the smells on cheese are very similar to body odors.” Did Freud ever address this one?

The cheeses are on display now at the Science Gallery at Trinity College in Dublin. Guests can smell the cheese, but leave the crackers at home; nibbling is not allowed.

Michael Pollan's latest book, "Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation," is a must read. But if you don't have the time, we narrowed down some of the most prescient themes about what it means to be the "cooking animal."

Very few of us are immune to the temptations of convenience. For the most part, we misunderstand what it really even means. When it comes to what we eat, modern convenience is highly conditional. In the last century, we’ve entrusted corporate “chefs” to determine the most expedient delivery mechanisms. Except, it seems, the convenience is mostly theirs—cheap, subsidized ingredients sold to us for their profit and gain, not our health, and often times, void of real flavors beyond the salt, sugar and fat they’ve helped us come to crave. Is it truly more convenient to microwave a frozen dinner that may make us sick, send an unreasonable amount of waste to landfills, and require excessive fossil fuel consumption than it is to cook for ourselves? Michael Pollan explores this and more in “Cooked.”

Like 2006’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Pollan once again took the role of reporter and subject in “Cooked.” He sought experts able to help him better understand the many elements of cooking, and then drew a well-crafted story from not-so-subtly subjecting himself to test each practice, repeatedly. “[I]n almost every dish, you can find, besides the culinary ingredients, the ingredients of a story: a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he writes in the introduction. It’s a simple concept, maybe one that we intuitively already know, but reading those words is a refreshing reminder of, beyond the health or environmental reasons, why cooking our own food is so vital to our sense of self. I imagine even the most skilled chef forgets the fairy-tale like quality a made-from-scratch meal can have. It’s unquestionably a far less interesting story when we’re removed from most of the process aside from opening a bag or pulling up to the drive-thru window. It’s a bit like tuning into every movie just for the last fifteen minutes. It may be exciting to watch, and even make a bit of sense, but there’s a whole story there we will never get to appreciate.

We can also look to cooking as the unique creations each meal is—temporary masterpieces never to be duplicated exactly again. We eat these works of art, becoming both the cooking animal and the cooked animal—as what we eat becomes us most literally.

So, aprons off to Mr. Pollan for sharing his journey with us. It’s a fantastic read, one that made me both grateful and envious. (Even though I’d never set foot near spit-roasting a whole hog, I give him props for the exploration and understanding the sacrifice the animals make.) No summary can do “Cooked” justice, but as always, there are quite a few important words to cook and eat by. Here are 23 favorites:

“A good pot holds memories.”

“So maybe the reason we like to watch cooking on television and read about cooking in books is that there are things about cooking we really miss.”

“For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?”

“Cooking is now baked into our biology (as it were), something that we have no choice but to do, if we are to feed our big, energy-guzzling brains. For our species, cooking is not a turn away from nature—it is our nature, by now as obligatory as nest building is for the birds.”

“Sharing is at the very heart of ritual sacrifice, as indeed it is in most forms of cooking.”

“…it seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems.”

“It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We gravitate towards complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat or fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and, specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away from the here and now. This sensory metaphor – this stands for that – is one of the most important transformations of nature wrought by cooking.”

“Cooking is no longer obligatory, and that marks a shift in human history, one whose full implications we’re just beginning to reckon.”

“The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending.”

“With a modicum of technique and a little more time in the kitchen, the most flavorful food can be made from humblest of ingredients.”

“Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes—and in our lives.”

“Consider the French fry. Fried potatoes did not become the most popular “vegetable” in America until the food industry relieved us of the considerable time, effort, and mess required to prepare them ourselves.”

“There’s something about a slow-cooked dish that militates against eating it quickly, and we took our time with dinner.”

“In the microuniverse of a sourdough culture, the baker performs in the role of god, or at least of natural selection.”

“Air lifts food up out of the mud and so lifts us, dignifying both the food and its eaters.”

“The fact that a whole food might actually be more than the sum of its nutrient parts, such that those parts are probably best not “put asunder,” poses a stiff challenge to food processors. They have always assumed they understood biology well enough to improve on the “unsophisticated foods of Nature,” by taking them apart and then putting them back together again.”

“Indeed, much of the innovation in industrial baking has gone into speeding up what has traditionally and perhaps necessarily been a slow process.”

“Alcohol has served religion as proof of gods’ existence…”

“If there is a culture that does not practice some fermentation of food or drink, anthropologists have yet to discover it.”

“To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest—on behalf of the senses and the microbes—against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities, rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of ourselves and of the places where we live, because your pale ale or sourdough bread or kimchi is going to taste nothing like mine or anyone else’s.”

“It is the infinitely more complex experience of a food that bears the unmistakable signature of the individual who made it—the care and thought and idiosyncrasy that the person has put into the work of preparing it.”

“But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy.”

]]>http://www.organicauthority.com/foodie-buzz/the-23-most-delicious-lessons-from-michael-pollans-qcookedq.html/feed/0If Obesity is a Disease, Should Processed Foods Be Banned? Or Are They the Cure?http://www.organicauthority.com/foodie-buzz/if-obesity-is-a-disease-should-processed-foods-be-banned-or-are-they-the-cure.html
http://www.organicauthority.com/foodie-buzz/if-obesity-is-a-disease-should-processed-foods-be-banned-or-are-they-the-cure.html#commentsWed, 17 Jul 2013 04:32:48 +0000http://www.organicauthority.com/s1-foodie-buzz/c4-foodie-buzz/if-obesity-is-a-disease-should-processed-foods-be-banned-or-are-they-the-cure/

The American Medical Association recently made a statement on obesity—a health epidemic sweeping the nation. They called it a disease. “Recognizing obesity as a disease will help change the way the medical community tackles this complex issue that affects approximately one in three Americans,” Dr. Patrice Harris a member of the association’s board, said in a statement.

The American Medical Association recently made a statement on obesity—a health epidemic sweeping the nation. They called it a disease. “Recognizing obesity as a disease will help change the way the medical community tackles this complex issue that affects approximately one in three Americans,” Dr. Patrice Harris a member of the association’s board, said in a statement.

The announcement has divided many health experts. Will lumping obesity in with cancer, heart disease, arthritis and the scores of other legitimate diseases bring more medical focus to “curing” it? Or will it fade like the inked prescription labels for the many other chronic ailments Americans guzzle down pills for with no real cures in sight?

Obesity’s causes are pretty cut and dry. The same can’t be said for lupus or cancer or even heart disease. And even though some weight issues are hereditary, and others may be a result of the chemical-coated world we now live in, what we put in our mouths every day greatly impacts our chances of becoming obese.

Author David H. Freedman thinks our obesity crisis may actually be cured by processed food—one of the biggest culprits in America’s battle of the bulge. In an article for the Atlantic (“How Junk Food Can End Obesity”), he blames the foodie elite “minority” for scaring us away from processed foods so much that it may have forced the industry into doing even worse things to get our dollars: “An enormous amount of media space has been dedicated to promoting the notion that all processed food, and only processed food, is making us sickly and overweight,” he writes, suggesting that the fast food industry as a result has “turned all the powers of food-processing science loose on engineering its offerings to addict us to fat, sugar, and salt, causing or at least heavily contributing to the obesity crisis.”

It’s true. The healthier we want our food, and the more demands we make of food manufacturers to sate this desire, the more crafty they get at manipulation. They gloss their shiny boxes and cans with buzzwords they know we want to read like “low sodium”, “all-natural”, “zero trans fats”—in desperate attempts to keep sales up and consumer demand high. They hire celebrities and launch witty campaigns that, hopefully, remind us how important brands are in our diet, and in our own identity.

It’s an inherently problematic scheme. Food manufacturers need to keep selling us products, both the old and the brand new. They buy the cheapest ingredients because most of their money is spent on clever ads designed to forge an emotional bond between consumer and the carton’s caloric content. You shouldn’t just like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese; you should absolutely love it, like you do a television show, a book, a record, a pet.

Freedman targets the author and food expert, Michael Pollan (calling his followers “Pollanites”) who has become the token spokesperson for avoiding processed foods whenever possible. He writes, “Foodlike substances, the derisive term Pollan uses to describe processed foods, is now a solid part of the elite vernacular.”

Should we really have another opinion on processed foods? Freedman goes on to compare made-from-scratch foods (albeit, a Mark Bittman recipe cooked in bacon fat) to not being much healthier than a Whopper. “The fact is, there is simply no clear, credible evidence that any aspect of food processing or storage makes a food uniquely unhealthy,” he writes. And that may also be true. But isn’t it common sense? Have we learned nothing from thousands of years of human history and how the rest of our fellow earthlings consume calories? Granted, in a post-apocalyptic world where all that survived to eat were cans of Spam and bags of Combos, most people would be pretty darn grateful, and satisfied, if not a little nauseated. But healthy?

We know that the human body responds differently to fresh, whole foods than it does to a canister of Pringles or a Doritos Locos Taco Bell Taco, which may actually be clinically addictive. In all his Pollan-bashing, Freedman overlooks some major issues with processed foods, namely industrialization.

Call me a Pollanite (seriously, please call me that), but isn’t removing the factory from my food a bit healthier for me and the planet? Foodborne illnesses result from the industrialization of processed foods. Rarely do they come from a backyard garden. And if they do–it’s also often because of contamination that began in a factory setting—be that farm run-off, contaminated soil, air or water. Pollution, deforestation, excessive use of fossil fuels all result from our reliance on the food industry. We can’t expect an industry that’s inherently unhealthy for the planet to offer us any real health benefits in the long run.

The food industry should perhaps be referred to more accurately as industrial food. The priorities are clear: Industry certainly comes before food, and profits before that. When profits are the sole desired outcome—and let’s not kid ourselves otherwise—there is always a demand for more. That means more “new” products. More new versions of the old (“now with more chocolatey flavor!”), and new acquisitions—buying up other brands to add to the corporate portfolio.

“In many respects, the wholesome-food movement veers awfully close to religion,” writes Freedman, from what’s hopefully just a temporary Twinkie-induced state of delusion.

In his best attempts, Freedman envisions a world where restaurants like McDonald’s become beacons of health serving the lower-class communities unable to afford the ‘foodie elite’ trips to Whole Foods. He points to the “healthy” changes the chain has been making over the years like reducing sodium, adding fruit and low-fat dairy to the menu. But these changes are a bit like the difference between being shot at point blank range by an expert marksman or someone who just practices at the range a few times a month. There’s a pretty good chance you’re going to have a bullet in you either way. One’s just more likely to kill you quicker. What he doesn’t point to is the reason why our food deserts exist in the first place. Or, how many communities are working hard to bring fresh food into those areas. And when they do, health dramatically changes.

As our obesity crisis is now formally a disease, we need radical and effective treatment. A diet pill won’t do. A prescription for low-fat yogurt loaded with sweeteners, artificial and genetically modified ingredients won’t do either. We have a drastic situation on our hands that calls for drastic measures. Cutting out processed foods is the quickest and healthiest way to reducing obesity. Even the natural and organic versions. Buying single, whole ingredient foods and cooking from scratch can and does render people healthier. It reduces the risks for food poisoning. It lets you control those important ingredient levels for sodium, sugar, fat. It also connects us with our food—something Freedman seems reticent to emphasize.

When food, or like Pollan calls them, foodlike substances, create disease in a body, we can develop a very negative relationship with what we eat. It is, after all, the enemy. Learning to prepare fresh foods from scratch can cultivate a healthful relationship with things that will eventually become part of our body. What’s more healing than that? It’s not McDonald’s, no matter how healthy their menu becomes. Sure, processed foods may be here to stay. But obesity doesn’t have to be.

"Foodie" is that broad label we either love or hate. Sometimes, it's a compliment—you're that person who knows everything about food. And sometimes, it's other than pleasant—you're that person who knows everything about food…

“Foodie” is that broad label we either love or hate. Sometimes, it’s a compliment—you’re that person who knows everything about food. And sometimes, it’s other than pleasant—you’re that person who knows everything about food…

However we’re looked at—we love food, plain and simple. Still, it can be a hard thing to reckon with. We have so many food stigmas in this country. It’s a divisive topic. But the best thing we can do is embrace exactly who we are. Food is essential to our existence. And if we’re passionate about it, let those passions fly!

Ask food experts like Michael Pollan or Alice Waters about what a meal really means besides nourishment, and you might hear some unexpected replies like "storytelling", "connection", or "community." The latter, in this case, may be an easier element for us to grasp. Most of us, at one point or another, have gathered around a table, sharing food with others. It's a rewarding experience, most of the time. For families, it can be the only chance during the day to sit down together and connect. For friends it can also be a way to share, laugh and catch up. It even has benefits between strangers, particularly when cultures are connecting through a shared meal. But now more than ever, many of us eat alone.

Ask food experts like Michael Pollan or Alice Waters about what a meal really means besides nourishment, and you might hear some unexpected replies like “storytelling”, “connection”, or “community.” The latter, in this case, may be an easier element for us to grasp. Most of us, at one point or another, have gathered around a table, sharing food with others. It’s a rewarding experience, most of the time. For families, it can be the only chance during the day to sit down together and connect. For friends it can also be a way to share, laugh and catch up. It even has benefits between strangers, particularly when cultures are connecting through a shared meal. But now more than ever, many of us eat alone.

There are benefits to the solo meal as well as the communal one. If done with intention, a meal eaten alone can be a mindful experience; a meditation. In the quietude of the solo meal one can focus bite by bite on the totality of the experience of bringing food into the body, appreciating, or at least, observing, the relationship we have with the natural world. Of course, solo eating can also mean guzzling down greasy fast food while in traffic, plopped in front of the television, or at a desk.

According to recent research conducted by the Hartman Group, as many as 46 percent of all adult meals are now eaten alone. Credit single-parent households, technology (that can make it feel like you’re not eating alone if scrolling through Facebook updates, but you are), shorter office lunch breaks, and the propulsion of our fast-food culture: we eat energy bars, sodas and junk as if they’re just another daily chore rather than a potentially gratifying experience.

While many of us fear the solo dinner in a packed restaurant, we often choose instead to eat alone in more convenient multi-tasking fashion, focusing instead on the blaring television news or negotiating the slow moving traffic rather than being truly alone with our food. And that’s just what many processed and fast food companies are banking on. You’re more likely to keep a freezer full of Hot Pockets than you are to take yourself out for a decent meal, or even prepare one from scratch at home. Getting pizza delivery or drive-thru is often the solo diner’s choice because much like sitting in front of a noisy television or scrolling through Facebook while you eat can make it feel like you’re not alone, the interaction with the delivery or drive thru person—albeit brief—can satisfy some of our need for the communal experience. Which, of course, eating has been throughout most of our history. While fast food itself is certainly changing our genetic makeup, we’re still connected to our ancestral food culture on some levels.

We eat together because we make food together. We hunted or gathered together. We shared resources. And although it doesn’t seem like that’s the case in today’s world where food comes from sterile shelves, freezers, boxes and cans, it still takes a community to prepare those meals. We’re still part of a food system that has many moving parts. Eating together bonds us to that system; it allows us to observe the pros and cons, and make changes where necessary. Eating alone can too, if we’re present for the experience with our nourishment. Our food system will change when our personal connection to our food experiences change, and that can only ever happen one bite at a time.

If you've spent any time on Facebook recently, you've most likely seen a number of comments, images and cartoons lamenting the loss of the most iconic junk food. Of course, I'm talking about Hostess' crème-filled spongy cake better known as the Twinkie, which could disappear from the planet permanently if the company does not find a buyer after filing for bankruptcy earlier this month and announcing the immediate closing of all its bakeries.

If you’ve spent any time on Facebook recently, you’ve most likely seen a number of comments, images and cartoons lamenting the loss of the most iconic junk food. Of course, I’m talking about Hostess’ crème-filled spongy cake better known as the Twinkie, which could disappear from the planet permanently if the company does not find a buyer after filing for bankruptcy earlier this month and announcing the immediate closing of all its bakeries.

Across the social media pond on Twitter, there were calls for a government assisted Twinkie bailout. The loss was seen as a sign that the Mayan calendar prophesy of the end of the world was indeed coming to fruition. Colorado and Washington state residents, where marijuana was just legalized, seemed to receive the news with horrific fears about how they’ll ever properly sate epic episodes of the munchies. Panic over the possibility of a Twinkie-less future sent consumers into stores, clearing out shelves of Hostess products in record time. Ebay had listings of boxes of Twinkies for as much as $10,000. As the eulogies piled up, so did the DIY it’s-not-really-junk-food-if-you- make-it-from-scratch recipes—vegan and organic options available, too—not just for the beloved Twinkie, but for all of Hostess’ products, which also includes Wonder Bread, Drake’s Cakes, and my once personal favorite: the chocolatey crème-spiraled Ho-Ho’s.

Since the announcement, advocates of healthy food have done their fair share of finger shaking at a country that loves its junk food. Obesity rates are still climbing, with CDC estimates that by 2025 more than 75 percent of Americans will either be overweight or clinically obese. Illnesses related to diet parallels our girth rates, too, with type 2 diabetes, hypertension and heart disease topping the list of conditions afflicting Americans. The Twinkie epitomizes all that’s wrong with America’s food system: a genetically modified, highly processed, chemical-filled, sugary junk food that doesn’t really decompose. It’s death certainly does leave room for us to be hopeful that healthier food options will take its place—especially for our nation’s children—but it’s by no means a sure thing.

A baker’s strike at Hostess over unionization eventually led the company into bankruptcy and left more than 18,000 employees at bakeries across the country out of work just before the holiday season, was pinpointed as the culprit this time around. But Hostess has been sold several times since the 1980s, reports Forbes magazine and “The company filed for bankruptcy in 2004, and again in 2011.” The Wall Street Journal reports that there may soon be a new owner of Hostess products: “Flowers Foods Inc., a Georgia-based baker, announced it has renegotiated lending terms to allow it to tap additional cash, in what analysts see as a clear sign it is gearing up to buy assets owned by Hostess.”

For a food to stay relevant and virtually unchanged when competing brands are constantly reinventing flavors, sizes and packaging is nothing short of a task. If a brand can’t compete with the changing industry, they often revert to being a “classic” hoping that we love our nostalgia almost as much as we love our junk food. Remember what happened to Coca-Cola’s sales when they brought back “Coke Classic” after the “New Coke” fiasco? Sales skyrocketed. We see the insanity each year when McDonald’s unleashes its limited-time-only McRib sandwich. And even if Twinkies never completely go away, the threat of losing them will give the brand new life…a zombie type of rebirth, if you will. They’ll become harder to destroy, carving out a more demanding niche in the minds of consumers who struggle to distinguish between indulgence and necessity.

Whether you’re cheering or weeping at the thought of life after Twinkies, the creamy center of this lesson remains unchanged: we are what we eat, or rather, Like Michael Pollan once reminded us in his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, “The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power—32 billion dollars a year—used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.”

Foodies can rejoice (and try not to drool) over the news that best-selling author, journalist and sustainable food expert, Michael Pollan, has announced the completion of his latest book, the longest from the author since his seminal 2006 release, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Foodies can rejoice (and try not to drool) over the news that best-selling author, journalist and sustainable food expert, Michael Pollan, has announced the completion of his latest book, the longest from the author since his seminal 2006 release, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Entitled COOKED: A Natural History of Transformation, Pollan’s latest work will be released in late April 2013, and appears to deepen his studies on our massive, industrialized food chain, “looking at a link I had only touched on before but have begun to think may be the most important,” the author is quoted as saying in a recent Sustainable Food News article.

“The industrialization of agriculture is inextricably bound up with the industrialization of eating – the fact that most Americans today are outsourcing the preparation of their meals to corporations,” said Pollan. “It turns out corporations don’t cook very well, and the cost of letting them try – to our health and the health of our families and communities – is far too high.”

Following up on the success of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan released Food Rules (2010), In Defense of Food (2008) and was a key component in the Oscar-nominated 2008 film, “Food Inc.” All put a clear emphasis on the importance of fresh, whole ingredients for our health versus the destructive effects–on our health and the environment–brought about by the excessive packaged, processed food industry. Pollan’s explorations of our relationship with food began with the earnest 2001 best-selling book, The Botany of Desire, and have continued to inspire an important movement focused on a (re)connection with our food–from where and how it’s grown or raised to how we prepare it.

Although few details are yet available about Pollan’s forthcoming book, it seems pretty clear that the author is suggesting a serious nationwide return to cooking from scratch: “Unless people are willing to take back some of the work of cooking, the food chain is likely to remain too long, too opaque, and too destructive.”

]]>http://www.organicauthority.com/foodie-buzz/new-michael-pollan-book-coming-next-spring.html/feed/0A Day in The Life of A Big Machttp://www.organicauthority.com/foodie-buzz/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-big-mac-mcdonalds.html
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Two all-beef patties. Special sauce. Lettuce. Cheese. Pickles. Onions. Sesame-seed bun. Even if you've never eaten one, you likely know the description as that of McDonald's signature Big Mac sandwich. The iconic hamburger is the definitive fast-food menu item: filling, quick and cheap, but what are we really getting for our $3 sandwich? Certainly there's more to it than just the 540 calories, 29 grams of fat and 25 grams of protein.

Two all-beef patties. Special sauce. Lettuce. Cheese. Pickles. Onions. Sesame-seed bun. Even if you’ve never eaten one, you likely know the description as that of McDonald’s signature Big Mac sandwich. The iconic hamburger is the definitive fast-food menu item: filling, quick and cheap, but what are we really getting for our $3 sandwich? Certainly there’s more to it than just the 540 calories, 29 grams of fat and 25 grams of protein.

We love great deals, and food is no exception. In fact, it’s more like the rule. There’s nothing wrong with cheap food (especially if it’s grown in our own yards). But that’s not the case in this country. Aisle after aisle of every supermarket is lined with impossibly inexpensive foods from cereals to snacks. And drive-thru after drive-thru is also pumping out those miraculous Dollar Menu items that defy all logic. How is it that a salad can cost more than a Big Mac? When we factor in the expense of raising a cow for meat and milk, growing and harvesting all the produce, manufacturing the bun, the sauce, transporting the food to the restaurant and then hiring people to cook, package and sell the sandwich, not to mention the billions of dollars spent on marketing the sandwich to you, it’s clearly impossible that any sandwich with that much involved could be sold for $3. Yet more than 550 million Big Macs are sold every year.

Big Mac ingredients are sourced from all over the continental U.S., Australia and New Zealand. Beef, chicken, pork, eggs and virtually all of the buns and breads contain genetically modified soy, corn and canola. The sesame seed bun and special sauce both contain a laundry list of toxic chemicals including mono- and diglycerides, ethoxylated monoglycerides, polysorbate 80 and ammonium chloride. Food science at its finest, no doubt, but it still seems impossible that the Big Mac could be so inexpensive. How do they do it?

One perpetrator is the controversial Farm Bill, which is responsible for subsidizing the industries that support cheap meat, mainly corn and soy. The grains and legumes are not the natural diet for cows, but they’re being fed to our nation’s livestock by the ton because federal subsidies on corn and soy save the beef industry more than $500 million per year. That’s a deflected cost put back on taxpayers. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meat is actually cheaper now than it was in 1978, because of subsidies. According to the PCRM (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine), “By funding these crops, the government supports the production of meat and dairy products–the same products that contribute to our growing rates of obesity and chronic disease. Fruit and vegetable farmers, on the other hand, receive less than 1 percent of government subsidies.”

Journalist and author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food) traced the production of a Big Mac, traveling from feedlot to wheat, corn and soy fields, to oilfields in the Middle East. He says that it takes 26 ounces of oil to produce a double quarter pounder with cheese. That oil goes into the fertilizer and pesticides, and transportation as well as packaging and other essentials to production. Author Raj Patel (The Value of Nothing) says that the more than 550 million Big Macs sold in the U.S. each year create nearly 3 billion pounds of carbon dioxide, and the cost to offset those emissions is more than $36 million dollars.

According to a team of Swedish researchers, a Big Mac uses .84 gallons of crude oil, or roughly 87 billions gallons per year. A Western Washington University researcher made a comparable sandwich with locally sourced ingredients and calculated that it required less than half the energy used in making a Big Mac served at a nearby location.The breakdown of McDonald’s energy consumption: Tomato and lettuce production and transportation, 0.181 gallons; beef and cheese, 0.329 gallons; bun, 0.067 gallons (no data available for special sauce).

And then of course, there’s the cost of the Big Mac after you’ve eaten it. With ten grams of saturated fat, it’s half the recommended daily limit, which can lead to obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease. The health care costs for diet-related illnesses are more than $700 billion per year. Fast-food outlets, like McDonald’s, also contribute to the rising taxpayer costs of federal and state welfare and food stamp programs and Medicaid, as the companies rarely pay above minimum wage, which keeps many individuals at the poverty line and dependent on government programs.

The trail of the Big Mac doesn’t end there. According to Californians Against Waste, “fast food outlets are our country’s primary source of urban litter and a significant hurdle to local communities’ waste diversion goals,” costing taxpayers millions more each year in litter removal.

Even the most informed foodies can often feel like they only have a limited grasp on what's really going on with our food system. Rules and regulations change all the time, and if you haven't been inside a factory or a factory farm—where most of our meals come from—it's incredibly difficult to imagine the enormity and scope of what exactly we're eating (yes, we're looking at you, Pink Slime!). But fortunately, there are people who can help piece together the big picture. And, they just happen to be super interesting as well, making them the ideal dinner guests for our fantasy foodie potluck dinner. Don't worry, we saved a seat for you, too.

Even the most informed foodies can often feel like they only have a limited grasp on what’s really going on with our food system. Rules and regulations change all the time, and if you haven’t been inside a factory or a factory farm—where most of our meals come from—it’s incredibly difficult to imagine the enormity and scope of what exactly we’re eating (yes, we’re looking at you, Pink Slime!). But fortunately, there are people who can help piece together the big picture. And, they just happen to be super interesting as well, making them the ideal dinner guests for our fantasy foodie potluck dinner. Don’t worry, we saved a seat for you, too.

Alice Waters: Where to begin with Alice? She transformed fine dining with her Berkeley, California restaurant, Chez Panisse, and continues to transform our relationship with food through her Edible Schoolyard Program that teaches children about the important nutritional, environmental—and tasty—benefits of homegrown food. Her potluck dish: Baby arugula salad with organic shaved fennel and a fresh berry vinaigrette.

Paul Stamets: Mushrooms are so much more than a pizza topping. Paul Stamets works to bring awareness to the myriad health and environmental benefits of fungus including mycoremediation (aka oil spill eating mushrooms), soil cleansing, pesticide alternative and immune boosting properties that can heal and prevent illnesses such as cancer. What’s his dish? Of course, wild foraged stuffed chanterelle mushrooms with truffle oil.

Ellen DeGeneres: The talk-show host can now add restaurateur to her resume with her highly anticipated Los Angeles vegan restaurant set to open soon. A vocal animal rights advocate, Ellen also recently launched a super informative and thorough blog full of vegan resources, tips and recipes that show just how delicious a vegan diet can be. Sweet, right? We’re pretty sure Ellen would bring a decadent dessert, like vegan coconut crème pie.

We are SO passionate about our food choices! But why is that? Nothing, except perhaps religion and politics, evokes as much heated emotion as debates over whether or not we should be eating meat or GMOs or if high fructose corn syrup and junk food are really all that bad for us. And then there's the issue of straight up preferences—the gross factor of foods that make us feel like gagging just when we think about them (please, nobody say "asparagus").

We are SO passionate about our food choices! But why is that? Nothing, except perhaps religion and politics, evokes as much heated emotion as debates over whether or not we should be eating meat or GMOs or if high fructose corn syrup and junk food are really all that bad for us. And then there’s the issue of straight up preferences—the gross factor of foods that make us feel like gagging just when we think about them (please, nobody say “asparagus”).

Stepping up to the McDonald’s counter, my Dad would translate my toothless mumble-mouth order to the cashier, “She’ll have a hamburger with pickles and mustard only. No ketchup, no onions.” Naturally, my sister preferred the opposite, and dare a stray onion make its way between my two sesame seed buns or a pickle in hers, and our Dad was back up at the counter for a replacement. My other sister hates garlic. I once met a person who swore they despised chocolate! President Obama hates beets.

According to The Yale Guide to Children’s Nutrition, “Picky eaters may be born that way: the ability to taste sweetness and bitterness may be genetically related to the number of taste buds on a person’s tongue. The so-called genetic supertaster, for example, may have as many as 1,100 taste buds per square centimeter of tongue, while a more accepting eater may have as few as 11 taste buds in the same-size area.” And while this may explain our aversions to the way certain foods taste, it only begs more questions about why it is we become so passionate about our repulsion. Most of us dislike certain music, or find the color hot pink objectionable, but we don’t typically respond with as much emotion as we do when spitting a half-chewed bite of Brussels sprout out of our mouth.

Research conducted by neuroscientists at Columbia University Medical Center in New York found some brain patterns that may explain the causes of our emotional eating. The researchers noticed excessive blood flow to areas in the brain that regulate the emotional control of food intake. When the hormone leptin was injected into volunteers, the brain activity about food changed from an emotional connection to a more conscious, rational one, identifying what appears to be a primal emotional trigger that was necessary to our ancestors when food was more scarce and we needed to be able to eat as much of it as we could when we stumbled upon it. Author Michael Pollan (Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Food Rules) points out this phenomenon, stating that we’re so passionate about salt, fat and sugar because of their relative scarcity in nature. It would certainly explain our predisposition to overeat these foods and the rise in diseases connected with them. More recent research places junk food in the same category as cocaine or alcohol, at least where addiction is concerned, and anyone who’s ever dived into the salty, flavorful remnants of an essentially empty bag of Doritos is somewhat familiar with this feeling of wanting more—and an apple or a celery stalk simply will not do.

And what about the ethics of eating? Show someone facts about the damaging cholesterol levels in meat or the traces of chemicals, hormones and pathogens found in a glass of milk, and prepare to take a few punches. Certainly the vegan argument goes well beyond what we eat, but why does the discussion—especially when backed by facts—lead to such hostility and defensiveness? Vegans hear it all the time—”I don’t know how you do it! I could never give up bacon/cheese/ice cream”—sentences usually uttered by someone repulsed by the torture endured by the factory-farmed animals who are turned into their indispensible bacon, cheese and ice cream sundae. Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium looking into our tendency to eat high fat foods when needing a mood boost, found that volunteers exposed to induced sad environments after eating fatty foods like bacon, cheese or ice cream were less likely to exhibit sad behavior than those who only received a saline solution, further compounding the inherent emotional connections we have to our food.

I gave up visits to McDonald’s long ago, but mustard and pickles, well, they still make me smile. And even though you’ll always find me on the non-GMO-healthy-junk-free-vegan side of the food debate, understanding that our connections to food preferences are dictated by irrational emotional triggers hard-wired into our circuitry long before the advent of food as an industry, makes it all that much easier to understand that human evolution takes a ridiculously long time. If we’re just now able to decode what connects us to our food choices, imagine where we’ll be a hundred years from now. Will we still be defending our love or our disdain for certain foods? Or will we finally have evolved to rational eating for optimal nutritional benefits that are low-impact on the earth and capable of feeding everyone?

We are list-heavy this week on From Our Friends! This jam-packed installment includes information on foods you should never buy, foods to jump-start your metabolism, and foods Michael Pollan will never eat. Between those and some great posts from MightyNest and Experience Life, your Friday lunch break will go by like that! Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

We are list-heavy this week on From Our Friends! This jam-packed installment includes information on foods you should never buy, foods to jump-start your metabolism, and foods Michael Pollan will never eat. Between those and some great posts from MightyNest and Experience Life, your Friday lunch break will go by like that! Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

1. Blisstree has put together a list of 6 things you should never buy (and their fast, healthy alternatives). Click through to check it out!

2. Trying to jump-start your metabolism? There’s a better way to do it than with RedBull. Take a look at EcoSalon’s 20 foods that boost your metabolism!

3. There’s been an interesting dialogue swirling around about the company California Baby, who recently reformulated some of their products but forgot to mention the change to their loyal customer base. Read more at MightyNest.

4. Everyday activities take a toll on our bodies, tightening our muscles and limiting our range of motion in potentially painful ways. This simple stretch routine from Experience Life can help undo the damage.

5. Have you ever wondered what Michael Pollan’s LEAST favorite foods were? Guess no more! Check out the list over on Rodale.

Historians have done their best to piece together a picture of the Mayan civilization that disappeared around 1,000 AD. Where they went—or why—still remains a mystery. But what they left behind (great pyramids, temples and stories), offers glimpses of an advanced culture that had a unique relationship to the world—one unlike the awkward and seemingly ill-suited connection modern culture struggles to maintain with the planet. The most popular story to emerge from the Mayans is the end of their long count calendar, which concludes a 5,125-year cycle on December 21, 2012. Some have predicted it signifies an apocalypse, a pole-shift or another means to the end of modern civilization, while others predict a subtler (and perhaps even more significant) shift affecting human consciousness and how we interact with the world.

Historians have done their best to piece together a picture of the Mayan civilization that disappeared around 1,000 AD. Where they went—or why—still remains a mystery. But what they left behind (great pyramids, temples and stories), offers glimpses of an advanced culture that had a unique relationship to the world—one unlike the awkward and seemingly ill-suited connection modern culture struggles to maintain with the planet. The most popular story to emerge from the Mayans is the end of their long count calendar, which concludes a 5,125-year cycle on December 21, 2012. Some have predicted it signifies an apocalypse, a pole-shift or another means to the end of modern civilization, while others predict a subtler (and perhaps even more significant) shift affecting human consciousness and how we interact with the world.

Central to the Mayans was food—particularly corn. According to their sacred text, the Popol Vuh, this era is considered the age of the corn people, which was created by the gods after two races of people (mud and wood) failed to embrace and honor the world. The corn people had great vision and understanding, too great in fact, so the gods veiled their abilities, which caused them to slowly move away from nature; they forgot how to respect the gods and the natural law. This age of the corn people is now coming to its end, just as corn has literally saturated the Western diet. According to best-selling author Michael Pollan (Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food), “If you take a snip of hair or a nail clipping from an American and run it through a mass spectrometer, as I have done, you will discover that most of the carbon in his or her body (and we consist mostly of atoms of carbon) originally came from corn.” So, did the Mayans predict the ubiquitous genetically modified high fructose corn syrup processed foodsuffs that have come to revolutionize our food system and turn us into corn people? Or how about another type of food revolution all together?

Daniel Pinchbeck is one of the foremost leading authorities on the Mayans and 2012. He is the author of 2012: The Return of Quetzlcoatl and co-founder of the web magazine RealitySandwich.com and the social networking platform Evolver.net. According to Pinchbeck, the Mayans weren’t the only civilization to point to 2012 as an important time (some other notables include the Aztecs and Hopi). “These World Ages end with a regeneration process, a cyclical cleansing destruction and beginning of the new.” But, that doesn’t necessarily mean a cataclysmic destruction of humanity. He says that it could, rather, just signify that we are in a process of transformation where the “Western scientific rational model has reached a limit, and at that limit we’re seeing a potential for integration with mystical traditions, shamanic traditions, and awareness that there are other aspects of the psyche that Western culture suppressed in its course of development.”

It doesn’t take a perspicacious eye to notice the acceleration of modernity, be it the advancing technologies or tragedies equally vying for the lead-in spot on CNN. And, says Pinchbeck, the acceleration is not just limited to the external reality, “We could be entering an experience where humanity self-realizes itself as a single organism, and therefore begins to collaborate and share the planetary resources with maximum efficiency, much as what happens in the individual body.”

And nowhere has human development become equally more and less efficient at the same time than in our food system. “The last century, we saw this triumph of industrialization that was applied to food,” and while monocrop agriculture has massively increased production capabilities, it’s also extremely detrimental to the soil and our diet because, according to Pinchbeck, “we’ve been pushing everything to maximum yield without thinking about long term consequences.”

Pollan suggests that it’s never a good idea to base an entire diet around a single species, and evidence of this can be found spiraling out in all directions from our exploitation of corn: “[F]ollow a Big Mac or a Coca-Cola or a Twinkie or a box of breakfast cereal or virtually any snack food or soft drink back to its ultimate source you will find yourself, as I did, in a cornfield somewhere in Iowa.” And the consequences are detrimental, as evident in the millions of pounds of antibiotics that lead to antibiotic-resistant deadly pathogens; or the excessive use of steroids and growth hormones routinely fed to livestock animals along with copious amounts of genetically modified foods—mainly corn, soy and canola—that have not been proven safe for humans or the environment after long-term exposure. The rising rates of obesity and type II diabetes in children as young as four years old have hit epidemic levels and caused the normalization of diet-related illnesses and a dependency on pharmaceuticals.

If ever a food revolution was necessary—or inevitable—there seems to be no more fitting time than now. It could come as an uprising, or a shift in consciousness, says Pinchbeck, through “recognizing and utilizing the Western aspects of technology and industry, but infusing a different philosophy around nutrition.” With environmental sensitivities on the rise (Pinchbeck has recently developed his own issues with monocropped foods including wheat), embracing practices such as permaculture seem to offer “a much more hopeful way of producing food.” Of course, we could see a shift in the other direction, too, as multinational seed and chemical companies like Dow, Monsanto and ConAgra continue to flourish and push GMOs and fast processed foods on Americans without labels or transparency. Because we can choose to eat organic, grow our own and vote on these issues, though, it is ultimately up to us and not Mayan calendars or prophecies, suggests Pinchbeck. “Hopefully we’ll move out of this idea of faster and faster, more and more, and move into this idea of quality and not quantity.”

Michael Pollan is a change-agent in the sustainable food movement. In 2010, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is the author of five books including The New York Times bestsellers In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire. His latest edition of Food Rules: An Eater's Manual is intended to help Americans distinguish between real food (and sadly) the cheap processed junk foods our nation has so passionately taken to and called "food."

Michael Pollan is a change-agent in the sustainable food movement. In 2010, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is the author of five books including The New York Times bestsellers In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire.

Two years ago, Michael Pollan released Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, a small book that helped Americans change the way they think about their relationship with food by providing simple, honest rules to eat and live by. Pollan’s rules (or guidelines as I like to call them; rules can be rigid and we all need a little flexibility in our life!) aren’t full of medical or nutritional jargon; just real, time-tested rules passed down from generation to generation that a grandmother would share with her daughter, or a simple piece of wisdom shared between two friends.

Food Rules hit a nerve. There was an overwhelming response from readers. Some readers even made T-shirts with their favorite rules. Many wrote to Pollan sharing their own bits and pieces of advice and wisdom that have been passed down through family history. So naturally, the inspiration behind the newest edition of Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual: the readers.

For the latest edition, Pollan teamed up with the talented artist Maira Kalman to bring a down-home, earthy feeling to the book. There’s something familiar yet inspired about Maira’s illustrations. They take me back to my childhood, cooking with my mother and grandmother, or on a trip through Europe where real slow food is still treasured and honored. The new edition of Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual also includes a fresh introduction from Pollan and 19 additional food principles.

Pollan’s rules are intended to help Americans distinguish between real food (and sadly) the cheap processed junk foods our nation has so passionately taken to and called “food.”

Pollan’s collection of rules keeps it simple: No medical or calorie counting rules (don’t people get tired of counting calories?). And my favorite rule is the super simple number 24: When you eat real food, you don’t need rules. If you stick to this one rule, you can toss out all of the other rules (even the calorie counting!).

As Pollan puts it, “There are now thousands of foodish products in the supermarket that our ancestors simply wouldn’t recognize as food.”

Rule #3: Avoid Food Products Containing Ingredients That No Ordinary Human Would Keep in the Pantry.

Many of these rules seem obvious when seen in the written word, but are so overlooked when walking down the grocery shopping aisle. Got any of these ingredients in your pantry: Ethoxylate diglycerdes, ammonium sulfate or calcium propionate? They’re all common ingredients found in highly processed foods, and they’re also toxic and potentially harmful to humans and the environment. That’s kind of the opposite of real food, don’t you agree?

Rule #6: Avoid Food Products That Contain More Than Five Ingredients.

Common sense tells us that the more ingredients in a product, the more processed the food is, and higher the chance of unrecognizable mystery ingredients winding up on our plates.

Rule #9: Avoid Food Products with the Word “Lite” or the Terms “Low-Fat” or “Nonfat” in Their Names.

Manufacturers have to replace the fat, sugar and other ingredients they take out with something, and usually it’s in the form of carbohydrates or other mystery ingredients that contribute to America’s expanding waistline. As Pollan states, “… removing the fat from foods doesn’t necessarily make them nonfattening. Carbohydrates can also make you fat, and many low- and nonfat foods boost the sugars to make up for the loss of flavor.” My advice: review rule number 24 above.

Rule #14: Eat Only Foods That Will Eventually Rot.

According to Pollan, “Real food is alive – and therefore it should eventually die.” (Honey is the exception, it can last centuries.) The eternal shelf life products can be found in the center aisles of supermarkets in cans, boxes, bags and the one container food should never come in: the tube (can you say chips?). Hint: shop the outer aisles of a grocery store or better yet, make a weekly visit to your local farmers market, sign up for a CSA (community supported agriculture) or start a vegetable garden.

Rule #15: Eat Foods Made from Ingredients That You Can Picture in Their Raw State or Growing in Nature.

I love this rule. It’s an especially easy way to make certain you’re eating real, wholesome and nutritious food. If you don’t know what ammonium sulfate looks like, then why would you eat it? So much of our food choices are imparted by visual cues: colors, shapes, textures and size. Eat foods that conjure those images and avoid the rest.

Rule #17: Buy Your Snacks at the Farmers Market.

Farmers markets connect you with local farmers and a bounty of fresh, seasonal and local foods. Fruits make the best snack ever, and as Pollan says, if you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re probably not hungry. So why not have apples, or other fruits readily accessible?

Rule #19: Eat Only Foods That Have Been Cooked by Humans.

In the introduction of the book Pollan makes three great points about the connections between health and diet. These facts are not questioned and should be read by everyone. Number one: Those that eat the Western diet – a diet high in fat, sugar, processed foods, meat, refined grains (like white flour), and very low in whole foods like vegetables, fruits and whole grains, are highly likely to suffer from what is now called Western diseases (or “diseases of affluence”) like obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even cancer. Those processed foods are rarely in contact with humans; instead they’re shuffled through machines and factories.

What’s stunning, Pollan goes on to state:

“Virtually all of the obesity and type 2 diabetes, 80 percent of the cardiovascular disease, and more than a third of all cancers can be linked to this diet. Four of the top ten killers in America are chronic diseases linked to this diet. The arguments in nutritional sciences are not about this well-established link; rather, they are all about identifying the culprit nutrient in the Western diet that might be responsible for chronic diseases. Is it the saturated fat or the refined carbohydrates or the lack of fiber or the trans fats or the omega-6 fatty acids – or what? The point is that as eaters (if not scientists), we know all we need to know to act: This diet for whatever reason is the problem.”

This is stunning and eye opening. America cannot continue to deny it’s self created health and obesity epidemic. It is time, America takes responsibility for it’s self created crisis. We have created a food system that is making America sick and costing our health system billions of dollars a year.

Fact number two: “Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases.” As Pollan states, the diet ranges on our planet are actually pretty extreme. From very high-fat diets like the Inuit in Greenland who subsist primarily off of seal blubber, to diets high in carbohydrates like the Central American Indians that live primarily off of maize and beans, to those that are high in protein like the Masai tribesmen in Africa subsisting largely on cattle blood, meat and milk.

With so many diets and lifestyle options today, like vegetarian, vegan and the Paleo diet, just to name a few, many preach that their way is the best. But Pollan goes on to make a great point based on the above.

“What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that most of us is now eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”

The third fact gives everyone a light at the end of the tunnel and the simple solution they need to regain their health. Stop consuming the Western diet. Those that do, experience great improvements in their health, and rather quickly. Food is one of the most powerful healing tools we have on the planet. If you feed the body real nourishing food and give it a chance to heal, watch the human body perform miracles.

Remember, if you forget your favorite rules, hark back to the super simple rule number 24: When you eat real food, you don’t need rules, you can forget about all of the other rules.

Food focused author and journalist Michael Pollan is known for his simple approach to nutrition ("Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not too Much.") in books including The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Rules and In Defense of Food, but his pared down approach doesn't end there. In a new video released by the educational initiative campaign, Nourish, Pollan reflects on the value of voting with our dollars, and voting with votes, offering an appealing approach to making changes to America's Farm Bill through the political process.

Food focused author and journalist Michael Pollan is known for his simple approach to nutrition (“Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not too Much.”) as demonstrated in his best-selling books including The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Food Rules and In Defense of Food, but his pared down approach doesn’t end there. In a new video released by the educational initiative campaign, Nourish, Pollan reflects on the value of voting with our dollars, and voting with votes, offering an appealing approach to making changes to America’s Farm Bill through the political process.

“We’re still at the very beginning of what may be a revolution in what we eat,” says Pollan, citing that “So much of our food system is the result of policy choices made in Washington.”

America’s Farm Bill passes every five years, but as Pollan states, “[I]t isn’t really a bill just for farmers; it really should be called the Food Bill because it is the rules for the food system we all eat by and those rules are really lousy now and they need to be changed.”

Proposed changes to the Farm Bill include dramatic cuts that would do little to support the small- to mid-size farmers and do more to support large-scale corporate agriculture. According to Pollan, “The reason we’re eating from these huge monocultures of corn and soybeans is that that’s the kind of farming the government is supporting in the form of subsidies in the form of agricultural research. All the work is going to produce those so-called commodity crops that are the building blocks of fast food.

“Why isn’t the research going into polyculture instead of monoculture? Why isn’t the research going into how to grow organically, how to grow without pesticides? So we need to shift the whole basis of the Department of Agriculture which really drives a lot of American farming to make that more sustainable and that will come by changes in the Farm Bill.”

There are an overwhelming number of food documentaries on the market today, ranging from political to fanatical and documentary to educational. One of the latest to come out, Nourish, is an incredibly refreshing step apart from the otherwise heavy food docs. With a near G-rating and Disney-like tone, it doesn’t try to scare you into eating well; rather, it brings you the leading voices in the food industry to invite you in with ease and nonchalance.

There are an overwhelming number of food documentaries on the market today, ranging from political to fanatical and documentary to educational. One of the latest to come out, Nourish, is an incredibly refreshing step apart from the otherwise heavy food docs. With a near G-rating and Disney-like tone, it doesn’t try to scare you into eating well; rather, it brings you the leading voices in the food industry to invite you in with ease and nonchalance.

The film is broken down into separate clips of sustainable food icons, each talking about something near and dear to their own heart. There’s food reformer Alice Waters, talking lovingly about gardens in schools, and Michael Pollan, talking about the power of eating with a community. Perhaps my favorite moment in Nourish is watching Brit celebrity Jamie Oliver talking to kids about why eating a purple potato is so cool—it’s not about being healthy, he stresses, it’s just about eating something awesome. The clip is an enjoyable riot.

Nourish is hosted by the ever-giggling Cameron Diaz (who I heard once did commercials urging women to turn off the water when they shave) so you know it’s going to be as harmless as food films can get. This is one you can show to your parents, to your meat-loving boyfriend, to the Republican hunter next door, and none of them will be angry with you afterwards. Mother Theresa was once asked why she never attended anti-war rallies, and her reply was that she only supported things that said “yes,” events that were pro-something; in other words, she wanted to be associated with only positive forces and actions in the world. This movie hits that same notion, and I believe it works.

This film works on many levels—it gives the audience a glimpse into the broader world of food today, beyond just “eat this, not that.” It reminds us of the importance of teaching our youth, of the joys of a community, and of the many ways food intersects in our lives outside of the kitchen. It’s a smiley face on a plate, and I say grab a fork.

Feeding ourselves has never been simple as Michael Pollan points out in his bestselling book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Our nutritional needs are highly complex compared to the rest of the animal kingdom (think of bamboo eating pandas or nectar feeding butterflies and bees). Perhaps it's the price we pay for our (ahem, perceived) intelligence. It gives us reasons to invent words like creamy, gooey and yummy, often used to describe the reward foods we allow ourselves after finishing all of our Brussels sprouts. But as we know all too well, those reward foods have become the default diet for much of the developed world. Manufacturers not wanting to lose market share to the healthy food we can grow on our own found a way to keep us eating their processed foods, too. It's called fortification. But what is it, exactly?

Feeding ourselves has never been simple as Michael Pollan points out in his bestselling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Our nutritional needs are highly complex compared to the rest of the animal kingdom (think of bamboo eating pandas or nectar feeding butterflies and bees). Perhaps it’s the price we pay for our (ahem, perceived) intelligence. It gives us reasons to invent words like creamy, gooey and yummy, often used to describe the reward foods we allow ourselves after finishing all of our Brussels sprouts. But as we know all too well, those reward foods have become the default diet for much of the developed world. Manufacturers not wanting to lose market share to the healthy food we can grow on our own found a way to keep us eating their processed foods, too. It’s called fortification. But what is it, exactly?

Adding nutrients to food is not new. We began adding iodine to salt in 1924 when incidences of goiter were on the rise. In the 1940s, breads began to include mandatory additions of niacin, thiamin and riboflavin. Fast forward to 2008 and the fortified foods industry was estimated at more than $30 billion with not only basic vitamins and minerals in milk and juice, but omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants for heart, eyes, skin and brain health found in everything from yogurts to soft drinks and cookies.

Vitamins and minerals used in fortification most often come via synthetics (chemically produced in laboratories that may or may not be located along the New Jersey turnpike) and can include a number of unnatural ingredients that make their health benefits questionable. An overwhelming number of common vitamins come from: Coal tar, petroleum, refined oils and methanol, and can use ammonia in processing. Then, those laboratory made vitamins are added to the denatured food that once had organically occurring nutrients in it, before being dried, extruded, boiled, mashed, pasteurized, homogenized, squeezed through massive factory machines, packaged and placed on the display stack at the end of the supermarket aisle.

If feeding ourselves has indeed always been a challenge, then the fortified processed food industry is like adding a blindfold and spinning us around umpteen times before letting us loose in a barren wasteland after not eating for a month. Ok, maybe that’s a bit extreme. Of course we do need vitamins and minerals, and the nutrient quality of our soil is a not-talked-about-enough concern. But our food excuses choices that are perpetuating the justification of sugar-sweetened breakfast cereals because of a touch of folic acid is only creating more problems, and the answer is probably not Wonder Classic Calcium Fortified Enriched Bread.

Discussing the many reasons to avoid white bread may seem like old news to you healthy foodies, but are you sure you're not still eating it? Although you may not be eating Wonder Bread, chances are, similarly processed stuff sneaks into your diet rather regularly. Do you know where it's hiding?

Discussing the many reasons to avoid white bread may seem like old news to you healthy foodies, but are you sure you’re not still eating it? Although you may not be eating Wonder Bread, chances are, similarly processed stuff sneaks into your diet rather regularly. Do you know where it’s hiding?

Whole grains are a key part of a healthy, balanced diet. But once those grains have been refined—stripped of their outer bran coating and inner germ during the milling process—all that is left is the endosperm, a carbohydrate that your body converts quickly into sugars that can spike and crash your glucose levels.

“Unbleached” flour is ubiquitous, but it is nothing more than white flour that’s only slightly healthier than its pure white cousin because it is not exposed to the harsh bleaching chemicals. But that’s the only difference. Are you eating any of these common foods that could be considered white bread in disguise?

Pasta: Noodles are probably the most obvious culprits. Durum or semolina flours are just fancy words for unbleached flour, and they are easy, cheap and hard to avoid. Opt instead for whole grain pasta, like brown rice, whole wheat or quinoa.

White Rice: Brown rice is a fiber, vitamin and mineral rich food. White rice, however, offers virtually zero benefits and has the same effect on your health as white bread. Choose brown rice or whole grains such as millet or quinoa.

Baked Goods: Ah, dessert. Or snack time. Or breakfast. Or 2am… we certainly love our glazed, sugary sweet anythings. Aside from sugar—legion among the world of baked goods—even healthier looking versions like muffins or biscuits are often made with unbleached flour. Bake your own (try healthy vegan baking) instead and follow Michael Pollan’s Food Rule about eating sweets only on days that start with “S.”

Whole Wheat Bread: It looks nutty and grainy and brown. But a closer peek at the label may reveal artificial or natural colors used to give that enriched or unbleached flour a dye job. Read your labels! And give sprouted grain breads a try, or learn to bake your own.

Health Food Store Bread: You think by stepping into the Whole Foods temple you’re safe from Wonder Bread and the ilk, but that warm and crusty ciabatta or sourdough is made with unbleached flour. Check the fiber content. Whole grain breads will have 2-3 grams of fiber per slice. Limit the rest to special occasions.